At 11:06 AM 2/27/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>If the partition is formatted with NTFS, that method will not work
>Larry A. Kaduce

You only need one of the partitions to be FAT or FAT32  in order for this
to work. DOS will need to see a partition that it can copy the I386
directory from, and a active primary C drive it can copy them to.

Personally I always make the <C> Primary active  boot partition,  either
FAT or FAT32, because it is the fastest file system, on the fastest part of
the hard drive. I typically make it 500 to a 1000 megs, and put my 350 meg
swap file on it, as well as any boot manager, and maybe a folder with dos
utilities.

If I dual boot Win98 I will make it FAT32 and install 98 here first. But
even if I just install NT, 2000 or XP on a NTFS partition I will put the
boot partition as a separate FAT partition that can boot to DOS. This makes
troubleshooting a lot easier when things go wrong. It also makes it easy to
back up and restore the MBR.

Rode
The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com


>
> >You cannot run XP setup from a DOS boot floppy.
>
>
>Yes you can. Boot off a floppy that is setup to load smartdrive.exe, and, if
>necessary, your CDROM DOS drivers. I recommend configuring smartdrive with a
>huge cache, one quarter of your RAM, up to 36 megs. If you do not do this,
>and use the smartdrive default size, then it can take a very long time,
>hours, to transfer the startup files, from your i386 directory to your C
>drive. Nobody, including Microsoft, understands why this occurs on some PCs.
>Make sure you have at least 216 megabyets of hard drive space available on
>your CD drive.

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